


Let The Water Lead Us Home

by LynnLarsh



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Basically an inability to tell the difference between real life and a simulation, Blue protects her Paladin bab, Existential Crisis, Home is something different for everybody, Keith learns a little about himself, Lance is always getting himself into trouble, M/M, Psychological Drama, dream vs reality
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 12:20:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7844677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LynnLarsh/pseuds/LynnLarsh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’d just wanted a glimpse.  It was stupid and childish and selfish, but he’d just wanted one more look out on the ocean, one more peek in the window of his family home, just in case they never made it back to Earth.  Just in case he never got another chance.</p><p>But this wasn’t the Holo-Deck from Star Trek.  And this broken simulator tube wasn’t going to be able to do any of that for him, now was it?</p><p> </p><p>A.K.A - Lance finds himself stuck in a simulation and Keith is determined to get him out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let The Water Lead Us Home

**Author's Note:**

> An idea I had after watching Ep. 9, so if you haven't gotten that far, **Massive Spoilers Ahead**. You've been warned.
> 
> Also, it's probably worth it to note that I headcanon Lance as Cuban (thanks to Veradero Beach) and even though I have my own hispanic heritage to go off of, I don't know what might be blatantly different between Mexican customs/slang and Cuban. I pulled from personal experiences living in Miami, but if you see anything that is horrendously stereotyped or just wrong wrong wrong, please don't hesitate to let me know so I can change it.
> 
> Hope you guys enjoy my first step into the Voltron fandom! I sure as hell enjoyed writing it.

He knows he’s probably not allowed in here.

After Allura had sacrificed her father’s artificial consciousness for the sake of the castle, and everyone in it, this area had gone unused. Not to say that the Paladins had utilized it much, or at all, before then; it was always meant as an escape for Allura, an opportunity for her to seek advice or relaxation. But Lance had always been curious of it, drawn to the possibility of it. On some level, it reminded him of the Holo-Deck from Star Trek, a room any of them might be able to utilize if given the proper data. A training room or a game room or _fantasy_ room, though that felt wrong somehow. This room held the last memories Allura had of her father; even Lance wasn’t a horn dog enough to jeopardize that.

That doesn’t mean he wasn’t tempted to check it out, though. For other purposes, of course. Probably even more embarrassing purposes, depending on who you asked. God, if _Keith_ ever found out-

After five straight nights of those dreams however, dreams that left his eyes burning and his throat tight, he was finally willing to take that risk.

The castle is kept on a sort of artificial schedule, lights dimming to a soft blue glow during the “Earthling Night Hours” and flickering to LED-style life at the calculated estimate of “Earthling Dawn.” From what Lance can tell of the castle’s quiet blue hum, it’s currently somewhere around two or three am. Even after all this time, his body still clings to the idea of time, of morning and day and night. Everyone’s does. But it feels different, like playacting. Pretending to go to sleep at night when really it’s nothing but night for eternity outside of the castle’s alien-glass windows.

The metal of the ship’s floor isn’t exactly cold beneath his bare feet, another nuance of its alien design, but it does feels hard and uncomfortable, helping him wake up a bit with each step. Or maybe it’s more the anxiety of what he’s doing, the idea of getting caught.

But he just… He’s tired. So, so tired. He needs _something_ to get him through this. Even if just for a second. Surely Allura will understand. If she ever finds out. Which she won’t.

Lance holds tight to that resolve the rest of the way to the room, gripping it like a lifeline as he approaches the door. He expects resistance as he reaches a hand towards the keypad, but he barely manages a single touch before the doors are sliding open with a hiss and a groan. Even after the Galra had taken over the ship, its defenses severely lowered, this room apparently mattered little by way of security.

Which suits Lance just fine.

For all that he’s done his research in secret, the vast quiet of the room catches him off guard. The darkness is almost oppressive, stretching for miles in every direction, it seems. It’s almost enough to make Lance want to turn back. What was he thinking, anyway? He doesn’t even really know how this place works (though Pidge had certainly explained their theories in enough detail), or if he’s allowed to be in here (probably not), so maybe he should just-

Before he can properly convince himself to turn around and go back to bed, the room seems to finally register his presence, a series of lights flickering to light at his feet. They brighten into a soft path of Altean blue, illuminating not just the bridge leading from Lance to the center of the room, but the room as a whole. It’s not as massive as Lance first expected, but it is large, a metal sphere curved around him at every angle, a raised platform in the center.

Before he can even process the decision, Lance finds himself walking towards it.

Again, as if sensing his approach, a circular light blinks into existence around the edge of the platform, the sound of a hiss echoing through the silence. Lance nearly stumbles back as the platform splits down the middle, a swirling puff of light-blue smoke escaping the parting seam as an internal platform rises.

The smoke clears to reveal the remains of a chamber, no more than shattered glass around broken sparking machinery, and Lance feels his heart sink.

Of course. Of course it’s broken. Of course this was a stupid, stupid idea. He knew Allura’d had to damage the simulator beyond repair in order to manually shut down her father’s artificial intelligence. He knew any hope of utilizing it to even a hundredth of a degree with Sendack had been nearly catastrophic, but still. He’d just wanted a glimpse. It was stupid and childish and selfish, but he’d just wanted one more look out on the ocean, one more peek in the window of his family home, just in case they never made it back to Earth. Just in case he never got another chance.

But this wasn’t the Holo-Deck from Star Trek. And this broken simulator tube wasn’t going to be able to do any of that for him, now was it?

Chest tight and feet suddenly uncomfortably chilled (he should have worn his lion slippers…), Lance places a hand against the tube, fingers touching lightly at the cracks in the glass. He closes his eyes.

“ _Lo siento, mama_ ,” he mumbles softly, biting his lip as if he can hold in the wave of bitter melancholy that washes over him. “All I can do is keep you safe. You and everyone else.” He tries to pretend it’s enough, but it still feels like a sacrifice. 

In the end, he’s just not strong enough to pretend he doesn’t miss them, miss the beach and the rain and his mother’s cooking, all of it. Earth. He pictures every inch of what he never thought he’d one day long for: The tree he learned how to climb on, his neighbor’s dog, twizzlers on pizza, that movie that was supposed to come out next month, racing his siblings from one end of the beach to the other, mac n’ cheese on Thursdays at the commissary, being allergic to his abuela’s perfume but having to hug her anyway because that’s what good grandsons do.

His mother’s grip on his arm when he misbehaved, or the pat on his head when he didn’t, or the touch of her lips to his forehead before he went off to join the Galaxy Garrison.

He misses it all so much it aches, makes him feel like he’ll never be strong enough, never be-

“Ah!” Lance yelps, ripping his hand away from the glass, a curse on his lips as he cradles his hand to his chest. Without realizing it, he’d let his hand slide across a more prominent sliver, a protruding shard digging into his finger with a quick but firm slice. A line of blood runs down the glass in a perfect mimic of the drop currently trailing a red path from finger to palm to wrist. But Lance barely notices, too enthralled with the way his blood on the glass slowly begins to shimmer, then spark, a soft glow enveloping the crimson trail in that same, soft Altean blue. 

Soon, every inch of the shattered replicator is glowing, practically thrumming with a low energy, occasional sparks of blue light dancing out from Lance’s blood, beckoning. Lance doesn’t know why he does it exactly, he never really gives much thought to a lot of his actions, and in retrospect, that should probably be warning enough for all the chaos that usually ensues. But still. Lance reaches out towards the shimmering, glowing, sparking drop of blood and touches his fingers back to the glass.

A warmth spreads from hand to forearm in a rush, tendrils of blue snaking up his arm in wavering streaks. In a moment of panic, he tries to wrench his hand away, tries in vain to wipe the branches of glowing, blue vines from his arms with his other hand, but the warmth is persistent. It spreads like wildfire, up his shoulders, along his back, deep, deep into his chest, before finally crawling with a sudden, tension-filled slowness from neck to face.

It settles behind his eyes, crowding his vision in a flash of brilliant blue.

He thinks he cries out for help, maybe to for the other Paladins, maybe for his mother, but he can’t hear it past the ringing in his ears.

Everything goes dark.

 

.x.X.x.

 

“ _Mijo_ ,” a familiar voice lures him out of a thick, groggy unconsciousness. He can feel himself turn towards it out of reflex, a groan escaping past the lump in his throat. His face is buried in something soft and cool, scents mingling in a soothing cocoon around his head. Lavender, fresh linen, the sweetness of fried plantains blending perfectly with the seasonings his mother always uses to spice the meat. “Lance, _mijo_ , wake up. You were having a nightmare.”

Everything snaps into place all at once, Lance jerking into full consciousness with a start, nearly flinging himself from the bed. His bed. With his pillow. In his mother’s house. Where she’s apparently cooking his favorite lunch.

And looking at him like he’s completely crazy.

Which he must be, because how else would he even be here if he wasn’t?

“Lance?” She continues to stare at him, a hand reached out in his direction but not touching, just hovering between them as if unsure. It can’t be real, he must be dreaming, and so, to prove to himself just how unreal she is, how impossible any of this is, Lance reaches out and grabs her hand.

Her very real, very concrete and touchable hand.

Lance lets go of her almost as quickly, mind racing. The look in his mother’s eyes is bordering on proper concern now, but Lance is too busy with his own concerns to bother with hers. He looks from her hand to his own (sweaty and trembling) and past them to his lap, covered in the blue and white blanket he used to use, the one his abuela had made. Carefully, as if worried he’ll shatter some illusion, Lance reaches out and touches it, the soft, time-worn patches of knitted wool catching beneath his fingertips.

It feels just as real as his mother’s hand had.

“Lance,” his mother’s voice whispers, and it’s exactly like he remembers. He’s almost afraid to look at her, afraid to touch anything else, afraid to know what’s going on. Because as terrifying and impossible as it may be, as considerably damaging as it may be to his sanity, he can’t help the lurch in his chest, the tug below his rib cage. He glances at his mother and nearly cries at how familiar every single detail is, a perfect replica of every memory he’s stored away since birth.

As much as it can’t possibly be, he wants this to be real more than anything.

“A-Are you…?” he hears himself whisper, words forming on autopilot as he reaches out again, taking her hand. She tightens her grip, palm warm against his fingers, and the crease between her brows loosens, lips tilting up in a relieved smile.

“Oh, Lance,” she breathes, raising her other hand to his cheek. He leans into the touch like he has a million times before. “I’ve never known a nightmare to scare you so badly.”

Lance’s laugh is hoarse, a bit wobbly. Oh. He’s crying. He blinks in surprise, the blurriness in his eyes dissipating some as his cheeks grow wetter.

“ _Mijo_ ,” his mother coos again, each lilt to her voice soothing over Lance’s frayed nerves, calming and confusing in the same breath. “Come here.”

Before he can respond, she pulls him into a hug, one he has no problem sinking into, melting against the embrace like he’s five years old again, desperate for comfort and home and warmth-

His whole body seizes against the rush of warm, warm, warm, recoiling against the memory of blue sparks, blue vines, blue flashes of light invading his vision. But when Lance jerks away from his mother’s grasp, eyes scanning desperately over his hands, his arms, there’s nothing, just his mother’s touch rubbing soothing circles into the skin of his shoulder.

“Lunch will be ready soon,” she says, and Lance knows it’s a distraction, so he latches on to it like a lifeline, grateful. “My son would sleep the whole day away if he could,” His mother tutts, mostly to herself, but also obviously a kind-hearted joke in his direction. She gets to her feet with one last pat on his head, and Lance feels like his world won’t stop spinning. Nothing makes sense, everything, even his own mind, spitting out one contradiction after another.

Only moments ago, he was wandering the halls of the castle. Now, he’s sitting in his bed, the scent of his mother’s shampoo still lingering in his nose like an echo of her presence.

Only moments ago, he was longing desperately for his old life, for his family, for his home, for _Earth_ , and now he was here, struck dumb and panicked at the very possibility of having somehow attained it.

Only moments ago, he had believed he might never see any of this again, and now…

For the first time since stumbling into unbalanced consciousness, Lance allows his eyes to wander, over posters fraying at the edges, over clothes still poking out of the half-open drawers of his dresser. Over the stain on his carpet from where he’d spilled fruit punch when he was six, over the trophy he’d won in grade school (100 meter sprint, second place). He looks over every detail, every memory, to find it all exactly where he left it, exactly as it should be. And there in lies the real contradiction, Lance realizes. 

How is it he can feel so confused, so completely insane and terrified, and yet still feel so, so relieved?

None of what he’s seeing and feeling and smelling (they say scent is the strongest link to memory, and god does he believe it) should be possible. There’s no way he can be here right now, not when he should be in space, with the rest of the Paladins, protecting the universe. There’s no way he can be home, finally home, after all this time. And yet somehow, it feels real. It feels as real as his space suit, as real as his psychic link with Blue, as real as the taste of food goo and the smell of alien spices and the sound of Blue’s blasters blowing a hole through one of Zarkon’s ships.

Lance closes his eyes. Too much input, too many crisscrossed wires, the headache of opposing forces of thought. 

Because he wants this to be real. He wants it more than anything. But there’s just… no reason for him to be here. Not when he’s been gone all this ti-

With a glance so involuntary it could only be born of a lifetime of practice, Lance shifts his focus to the side wall.

The calendar hangs open over his desk where its always been, single lines slashing through the first two weeks of dates. But it’s the month that grabs Lance’s attention, eyes locking on it and staying there, unable to process what he’s seeing. He wracks his brain, looking for a mistake, but there’s no denying it. He’d know that date anywhere. 

Impossibly, his calendar announces the month after he’d been breaking Shiro out of the Garrison’s clutches, bonding with a giant robotic lion, joining an elite team to create the universe’s most powerful weapon. Even more impossibly, each line marks off a set of distinct dates, time off from training he’d been granted to visit his family, a vacation he’d been ridiculously looking forward to way back when (not that he’d told even Hunk about that).

But most impossible of all, is the date most recently scratched away. Lance had taken to keeping a makeshift calendar of his own in the castle, the organization of his days making him feel just a little bit more human, just a little bit less like he was merely floating through space, farther and farther away from Earth and sunrises and sunsets.

And just that morning, in what would have been Earth’s pre-dawn hours, before taking that long walk down the castle’s halls, Lance had marked off that exact same date.

 

.x.X.x.

 

“How long has it been now?” Shiro asks for the second time, walking from one end of the training deck to the other in a way that probably isn’t meant to seem like pacing, but it is.

Pidge huffs, leaning back against one of the pillars at the far end of the room, arms crossed over their chest in frustration. “Two hours, thirty-eight minutes. What the hell is he doing, anyway?”

“Sleeping in?” Hunk offers, even though Lance is usually (outside of the occasional drill) one of the first to wake up, a timely “morning beauty routine” keeping his schedule neat and punctual. “I mean, he’s been acting kind of off since the castle tried to shoot us all into an exploding star. Maybe he hasn’t been sleeping well?”

Keith activates his bayard and deactivates it, activates it again and allows his sword to materialize, giving it one swing, two, then letting the whole thing disappear to nothing. His hands won’t stop itching for motion, his whole body practically vibrating with an energy that’s difficult to pin down. It’s like frustration, like anxiousness, but less palpable. 

The thing is, as much as Lance “prides himself” on being the most laid-back, the most blasé and carefree of their group, Keith wouldn’t be surprised if he cared more than anyone. It’s in the little things, like how he’ll be the first to ask for a lunch break even though Hunk’s the only one who’s hungry. Or how he’ll repeat an advanced combat technique over and over until he gets it right, maybe out of pride, but mostly because he just seems to really want to improve. Or how he’ll spend hours checking Blue’s mechanics, or checking on the healing pods, or just checking in on everyone after a big fight. He thinks no one notices, but they do. Or Keith does, at least. 

But outside of all that, what Keith’s been noticing more than any of those is exactly what’s putting him on edge today. 

Outside of their first failed drill as a team, Lance has never been late to a training session.

“Maybe it wasn’t the near death experience that got to him,” Shiro breaks the momentary silence, sharing a glance with Allura. She bows her head a bit, still healing from the loss. Keith tries not to be too obvious about staring at the scene in his periphery, but it ruffles him a bit. Outside of Allura herself, and even Coran to a degree, Lance seemed strangely effected by the loss of Alfor’s consciousness. When Keith had asked Shiro in passing, all he’d said was that family seemed to matter a lot to Lance. Watching someone else lose the last of theirs must have been hard.

Not that logically he doesn’t see the possible dots connected there, but Keith hasn’t had a family for a long time. It’s not something that makes a lot of sense to him, that level of sympathy. So, his own social ineptitude aside, he still doesn’t get how it could effect someone enough to make them miss training.

“I’m gonna go see what’s taking him so long,” Keith finally decides out loud, practically storming from the room. He’d better be sick, dying, or on fire, otherwise Keith is going to kick his ass. 

Or he would, if he could _find him_.

When Lance’s room turns up empty, bed a mess and suit still hanging in the closet untouched, Keith takes to checking every place in the castle he can imagine Lance would have gone. Each one turns up as unoccupied as the last, and that nagging frustration, that unidentifiable anxiety, starts to grow.

“I can’t find him,” Keith says, a little out of breath from sprinting back to the training deck. Not from worry, of course, he’d never be panting and frazzled from _worry_ , least of all because of _Lance_. But still-

“What do you mean you can’t find him?” Hunk gets to his feet, everyone following suit. Even Allura and Coran come closer to the forming circle of confused Paladins.

“I checked everywhere,” Keith shoots back, frowning. Pidge taps something on their wrist, a screen flickering to life above the arm of their suit.

“Then you must have overlooked something,” Pidge says with a matter-of-fact tone that contradicts the roll of their eyes. “it’s not like he’s playing hide and seek.”

“Our castle may be large, but it isn’t infinite,” Allura offers. “There are only so many places within that Lance could have wandered into. He must be here somewhere.”

“Unless he accidentally shot himself into space,” Coran offers unhelpfully, smiling brightly as if his idea is the most likely. Which, considering the ship’s recent attempt to do just that, wouldn’t be too unheard off.

Still, Hunk clears his throat, looking at Coran with a shake of his head. “Too soon, man.”

As Coran attempts a confused apology, Shiro steps up behind Pidge, watching them click through screen after screen. “Wherever he is, I’m sure he has a reason for skipping training.” Shiro’s voice is stern, broking no further argument. Or theorizing.

“I tapped into the castle’s security sensors and identified all signs of life,” Pidge finally declares after a moment. Allura waves her hand from Pidge’s suit to an empty area in front of the group; three large screens projecting blueprints of various parts of the ship. Each blueprint has multiple pinpoints of light somewhere inside, with the exception of one. “We’re all obviously the specks in the training deck,” Pidge explains, pointing at each screen in turn. “Those four congregating together must be the mice. Which means the speck in that sector must be-”

“But what could he possibly be doing in there?” Allura cuts them off, eyes set a little wide, nervous. Her posture has gone rigid, shoulders tense. “He has no reason to be in there. None of us do.” And even though she doesn’t say it aloud, everyone can hear the pained words beneath, _Not anymore_.

“Princess, I’m sure whatever his reasoning for-” Shiro tries, but Allura is already making her way out of the training deck and in the direction of the simulator. With a worried glance between them, the group follows her lead.

“You don’t think the ship’s still trying to kill us, do you?” Hunk whispers loudly to Coran, the both of them trailing behind. “Like, Sendak’s brain is still wired into the mainframe or something and brainwashed _Lance_ into crashing the ship this time?”

Coran shakes his head confidently. “Not possible. I’ve tested and retested the new systems myself. The castle has 100% Altean blood flowing through her veins yet again, no trace of Galra influence to speak of.”

“Lance was probably just exploring and got lost,” Pidge shrugs, but something doesn’t sit right, everyone can feel it. Without even realizing, Keith has activated his bayard, clutching it tightly enough that his knuckles pop beneath the fabric of his gloves.

When they approach the room, the door is already open, a trail of light leading towards the center platform, beckoning them in. But it’s what’s _on_ the platform that has them all rushing inside, Keith the first to notice, the first to sprint in its direction.

“Lance!” He shouts, but Lance’s form remains motionless, lying prone amidst a carpet of metal and broken glass. “Lance, are you-?” 

A rush of energy and power knocks the breath from his chest, flinging Keith back a good few feet.

Ears ringing and eyes struggling to regain focus, Keith scrambles back into an automatic fighting stance, shaking the dizziness from his head as best he can. But even once his brain comes back online, he can’t seem to process what he’s seeing. No one can.

“Are you sure the castle isn’t trying to kill us?” Hunk whines, his bayard materializing even as his eyes widen in fear. “Because this is starting to look painfully familiar.”

Keith shakes the last of the cloudiness from his head and inches towards the root of Hunk’s concern, the dome of a particle barrier suddenly preventing all of them from getting any closer to Lance. He bangs a fist against it once, the whole thing shuddering with a groan but otherwise remaining strong, impenetrable. It glows a warm, vibrant blue, different from the blue that lights the halls at night or flickers across the castle’s main particle barrier. Keith can sense a familiar energy emanating from it, but he can’t seem to place it.

“The force field’s energy isn’t malicious,” Allura says in a way that makes it seem as though she’s talking mostly to herself. “In fact, the energy seems almost…” She steps forward until she’s standing next to Keith, an hand outstretched in the force field’s direction.

“Careful, Princess,” Keith tries, but she’s already placing her palm against the barrier, her eyes fluttering closed.

“This is… It didn’t seem possible, but I… It doesn’t make sense.” Allura pulls her hand away, hugging it to her chest as her eyes open wide in distress. “This barrier belongs to the Blue Lion.”

Keith knows it’s true instantly, the familiar energy settling across his skin in a way that’s almost soothing, nostalgic, but still he takes a step back. “Blue? That’s not… Why would she be trying to keep us from him?”

“I don’t know,” Allura frowns, placing her hand back against the barrier, fingers curling in slightly against the wavering field of energy. “It feels like she’s trying to… protect him?”

“Protect him from what? Us?” Pidge huffs, already trying to pull up various holograms of Blue in her hanger, layouts and screen of Blue’s influence on the ship’s energy. “Does Lance not trust us?”

“I’m sure that’s not it,” Shiro cuts off the idea before it can fester. “Blue is protecting him from something, we just don’t know what. We need to-”

“Lance!” Keith charges back towards the barrier, banging his fist against it once, twice. “Lance, let us in!”

“Keith, that’s not-” someone tries to say, but he’s not listening. Lance still isn’t moving, and sure, Blue seems to be protecting him, but from what? What if he needs their help and Blue isn’t _letting them in_? 

“Lance, wake up!” He tries. “Lance, it’s me, Keith! Let us in already!” Still nothing. Still _nothing_. “Lance, you have to-!” This time, when Keith’s fist connects forcefully with the barrier, a vibration of sound crawls up his spine, an image implanting itself behind his eyes just like back then, just like that first moment, when he’d finally understood what he was meant to do, who he was meant to do it with.

Only this time, the image is broken up into two easy to understand fragments. One is of Blue, present and predatory and crouching over Lance’s unconscious form, a low growl echoing from her clenched jaw. The other is of Lance, standing on a beach, eyes closed and head thrown back, face warmed by the afternoon sun.

When Keith pulls away from the mirage, he doesn’t need to look back at the rest of the group to know that they saw it too. He can feel it. Just like he’s sure everyone could feel that last fragment of thought before Blue cut them off, severing them not from her thought, but from Lance’s.

Relief, contentment. The desire to stay exactly where he is and never come back.

 

.x.X.x.

 

Clouds of sand kick up beneath his feet, mini explosions spurned by sharp twists of momentum as Lance barrels forward, backward, forward again. His hand reaches out towards a small, tan leg but just misses, so he spins around in the other direction, aiming to wrap his arms around a tiny waist in a frilly one-piece suit. But his plan of attack is easily thwarted, his younger siblings darting away in fits of triumphant giggles.

“You win, you win!” Lance pants, the sound muddled with a laughter of his own. His siblings groan and whine, but allow him to drop to his back in the sand. “Two against one isn’t fair anyway,” he says, and his stomach lurches.

“ _Do you think Zarkon will play fair?_ ” Allura’s voice whispers harshly across the back of his mind. But he closes his eyes, blocks it out. She’s not here right now. None of them are. Just his family and the sand and the water crashing against the shore at his feet. He doesn’t need to think about Zarkon. He doesn’t need to think about Voltron or the universe or Kei-

“Oof!” Lance wheezes, a sudden fierce pressure crashing into his chest. When he looks up, blinking away the crushing memories in exchange for the crushing weight of his youngest sister, everything feels strangely lighter.

“One more, one more, one more!” She squeals in unison with her brother, his hand already wrapped tightly around Lance’s wrist, attempting to pull him back to his feet. It’s as good a distraction as any, and he scrambles after them with a playful yell, taking to the fresh game of tag with a renewed vigor.

It doesn’t feel like a dream.

When he closes his eyes, he can still taste the way the air in the castle is just a bit lighter than Earth’s, can still smell the ever present food goo in the kitchens and dining area. He can still feel Blue’s comforting mental weight around him, a psychic blanket there to keep him safe and sane and-

A part of him knows it _wasn’t_ a dream. 

All that, everything that happened, everyone he’d met and grown to care for and wanted to protect, there’s no way it wasn’t real. But this feels real too. Playing with his siblings, getting sandy and wet from the waves, knowing that in a few hours, they’ll all go home to a dinner his mother probably made too much of… He lived and breathed this his whole life, he knows what this feels like. He knows what _real_ feels like.

If Voltron and the rest of the Paladins wasn’t a dream, but this, his family and the beach and Earth, feels too concrete to be a dream either… Then what _is_ real?

At one point, he must have stopped running, his little brother grabbing onto his hand, shaking it impatiently. “You’re still it,” he says. “You can’t stop.”

“I know, buddy,” Lance murmurs back, not really paying attention. Though he does take a second to ruffle his brother’s hair. “Sorry, I’m just tired, I guess. We can go again after dinner, okay?”

His siblings seem less than convinced, but they run off to play in the water nonetheless, allowing Lance to sit down in the sand, eyes locked on the horizon. After a moment, his gaze shifts, climbing up, up, up, until his back is sinking into wet sand again and all he sees is sky.

Briefly, a completely involuntary thought, he wonders what he’d be doing right now if he were up there, in space amongst the stars, with the rest of his team. Would they be fighting another battle? Would they be training? Would they be having one of their rare moments of down time, hanging out in their own ways, sometimes together, sometimes not?

But… If Lance is down here, are they even up there? Is everything moving on without him? Was he simply teleported back to Earth, the rest of Voltron left to figure out how to save the universe in his absence?

Or was that all an impressive display of his own imagination? He knows everyone exists, or at least likes to think his memories of the Garrison are convincing enough to be irrefutable. But Voltron? A giant robot meant to vanquish a great evil before it destroys the universe? It seems impossible. And maybe it was more believable when he was in space (if he ever actually was in space…) but here? With nothing but the beach beneath him and the sunset in front of him, it seems more and more difficult to accept.

If either of those was the dream, it’s obvious which seems more likely. 

So why is he having such a hard time accepting this? Why can’t he just embrace this miracle for what it is? He wanted to be home again and now he is. Full stop. Why can’t he just-?

High tide has rolled in. Lance can feel it in the way the water rushes in around his ankles. But as comforting as that push and pull is, he can’t seem to tear his eyes away from the heavens, pinpoints of the brighter lights shining behind his eyelids like photo negatives.

He feels like he’s being pulled in two different directions.

“Hey,” a familiar voice grabs his attention, the sand shifting at his right as his oldest sister settles down next to him. “You alright, kid?”

“Don’t call me kid,” Lance mumbles, mostly out of habit. He stopped meaning it years ago; teasing is just as much an expression of love as hugs and goodnight kisses in his family.

“Yeah, yeah,” his sister laughs, nudging at his leg with her foot. “Dinner’s ready.”

The sound Lance offers in response is more noncommittal than he intended, so he clears his throat and tries again. “I’ll be in soon. I’m just… I wanna look at the stars a bit more. If that’s okay.”

A silence settles between them, and even though she doesn’t say anything, Lance can feel his sister staring. He’s known her his whole life; he couldn’t keep anything from her if he tried. So before she can break the silence, he does it himself.

“Do… Do you ever realize how far apart the planets are?” He finds himself asking, his heart squeezing painfully in his chest. He can still hear Coran’s response to that question, can still feel the fear and the pain of the explosion behind him as they made to leave, all of it so real, so _real_.

“Is that what’s bothering you then?” His sister brings his mental spiral to a sputtering halt. Lance turns his head to look at her, sand sticking instantly to his cheek.

“What?”

His sister is looking down at him, smiling in a way that’s always been so comforting. “You were promoted to fighter pilot a couple of months ago, right? Are you worried about having to leave? About being so far away from home?”

With a start, Lance sits up, his pulse racing. She’s not all that wrong. It is something that was bothering him, but he’s here now. He’s back. Those words make it sound like he never left, and the reality of that crashes down around him in an almost numbing display of realization. She must take his silence as a prompt to continue, though, so she merely reaches out a hand to grip tightly at his shoulder, anchoring him back to Earth.

“I know the Garrison has been hard for you. It was hard for me too, but I hear your scores in the simulator have been better, and you’ve been getting along with your team finally,” she smirks playfully at him and he swears he feels like he might cry. Again. He’s been doing that a lot recently. “You’ll be alright. You’ve got a lot more training to do before they send you on a mission anyway.”

“I don’t want to go,” Lance hears himself whisper on half-second delay, the sound unrecognizable, raw. Even his sister blinks at him in surprise before tightening her grip on his shoulder.

“Then you can do that too,” she says. “You and I both know you joined the Galaxy Garrison to find yourself, and I don’t blame you. We do what we think we have to. But if that isn’t your dream any more, _manito_ , than you can always come home.”

“But what if I can’t?” Lance leans into her touch, trying to find the same strength in it he’s always found, hoping it’ll help calm the burn behind his eyes, the pain in his chest. He pictures wormholes and robot lions and alien ships and his throat tightens. “What if I end up not being able to come back? I don’t know if I-”

“You’re too hard on yourself, you know?” His sister huffs, removing her grip from his shoulder to ruffle his hair. When Lance looks at her again, she’s looking out towards the water, the moon shining soft against her face in a way that makes him miss her even more than he did up in space. “If you don’t want to go back to the Garrison, then don’t. Stay home for a while. Find a new dream.” When she looks at him again, her smile is soft and kind in a way that only manages to emphasize her words. “No one will judge you if you decide to follow a new path. Space isn’t for everyone. Sometimes you’ve got to know when to stay on Earth.”

After that, she says something about dinner getting cold and gets to her feet. Lance follows but only barely, his mind stuck on the beach, stuck repeating those words in a daze.

_Sometimes you’ve got to know when to stay on Earth, huh?_

Could it really be that easy?

The thought is brief and nearly incomprehensible, but it leaves him almost breathless in its possibility. He could stay. In this version of his life, in whatever parallel universe he’s found himself in, he could stay and never get lost in space, never have to fight alien monsters and risk his life, never have to wonder if he’ll never see his family again. He could stay.

He could _stay_.

But should he?

The decision feels too heavy for him all of a sudden, as if making it might be the first step down a street he doesn’t know if he has the strength to navigate. It feels like the fork in a road, that poem about the two trails, one safe and leading towards sunlight, the other dark but possibly filled with adventure. He thought he knew which one he’d always take, but now…

Just before walking inside, Lance glances back at the beach, the moon reflected in fragments against the choppy waves. He follows it up, eyeing each of the stars not blotted out by the lights of the city. An easy trail, a safe trail, lit by moonlight on the water. A darker trail, a dangerous trail, lit by countless stars against an endless backdrop of night.

_No one will judge you if you decide to follow a new path._

 

.x.X.x.

 

Despite the fact that Blue’s barrier is keeping them from getting any closer, Allura and Coran manage to roughly determine what might have resulted in Lance’s current state. It all starts when Hunk notices the blood.

“Hey guys,” Hunk calls out from the other side of the barrier, the point that manages to get the closest and clearest visual on Lance. “Hey guys, I think he’s bleeding!”

“What?” Keith practically jumps to his feet, rushing to Hunk’s side. He sees it instantly, no longer a freely flowing wound, but a definite symptom of one. Lance’s hand is stained in streaks of red down to his wrist, a splatter on canvas to match the drying smears along the edge of the broken simulator. “He must have cut himself on the-”

“Of course!” Allura chimes in, already maneuvering through various screens in the empty space in front of her. “The reaction of human organic material coming into contact with severed Altean technology may very well have caused an adverse effect on Lance’s mind.”

“I don’t think I follow,” Shiro frowns, watching as Keith adamantly refuses to take his eyes off Lance. The longer he remains unmoving, it seems, the thicker the tension in the room grows.

Coran chimes in, watching in a sort of proud fascination as Allura works through various slides of data. “When Lance’s open wound made contact with the AI simulator, it must have reacted to him on a neurological level. The machine was accustomed to housing information in order to produce an artificial but accurate depiction of King Alfor. Since its destruction, traces of that directive could very well have been waiting for a new feed, if you will.”

“But then wouldn’t it have just, I don’t know,” Keith huffs, running his hand through his hair in frustration, gesturing widely in Lance’s direction. “Take the blood data and make an AI clone of Lance or something? Why is he unconscious?”

“This is only a theory,” Allura replies, waving a hand in an arc at the open air until each screen blips out of existence. “But Altean technology was never meant to interact with human data. Even our attempt to extract memories from Zarkon was only partially successful. With Lance,” Allura takes a step forward, another, until she’s back at the particle barrier, placing a hand softly against the shimmering field. “Perhaps, with the organic quality of the data given, the simulator reacted internally, pulling Lance into a simulation rather than projecting one. With no data already stored, it had to create a simulation off of what was given.”

At one point during Allura’s hypothesis, everyone had gathered around the barrier, all eyes locked on Lance. His breathing is slow, the movement beneath his eyelids very similar to REM sleep. 

“So,” Shiro breaks the momentary silence again. “What you’re saying is that Lance is… currently in a simulation?”

“Quite possibly, yes,” Allura nods, a solemn motion, as if she wishes she were wrong.

“So if the AI simulator is running a simulation inside Lance’s head,” Pidge huffs, pinching at the bridge of their nose in aggravation. “Then how are we suppose to get him out of it?”

“We can try yelling,” Hunk offers hopefully. “Maybe he’ll hear us and wake up?”

“Not likely. From what I can gather of his signs of life, he’s in a similar state as the medically induced stasis of the healing pods,” Pidge shuts him down with a sigh. “He’s basically in a coma.”

“So then we have to find some way to get inside his head,” Shiro tries. 

“Oh!” Pidge pulls away from the barrier, turning towards the rest of the group with a finger pointed towards the ceiling. “What about the neural transmitters? From our first days of Voltron training!”

“Oh yeah!” Hunk jumps in with his own enthusiastic nod of approval. “If I managed to get inside Pidge’s head hole, maybe one of us could-”

“It’s not gonna matter if we can’t get Blue to take down this damn barrier,” Keith interrupts with a slap against the force field, the whole thing rippling against the assault. “If Lance is stuck in some sort of Inception level mind game, why isn’t she letting us get him out?”

“We have a plan in motion, Keith,” Shiro tries, a hand already reaching out in his direction, a comfort that leaves Keith bristling. “We’ll figure out how to deal with the barrier after we-”

“That’s not good enough!” Keith shouts, pulling away before Shiro can make contact. “Lance hasn’t moved since we got here. How do we know he’s not so far gone in this simulation that we’ve already lost the chance to pull him back out? We’re running out of time!”

“Keith,” Shiro says again, voice more stern, but still bordering on placating. “I know you’re worried about him. But we need a plan. We don’t know what charging head first into this might do to his mind.” This time when Shiro stretches a hand out for his shoulder, Keith allows it, though he refuses to meet the man’s eyes. “Look. Lance and Blue are connected, right? She must have a reason for keeping us out. We just need to figure out what that is and then we can figure out how to-”

“You’re right, Shiro,” Keith nods, taking a breath and exhaling long and hard through his nose. Shiro smiles, opens his mouth to say something more, but Keith has already turned away from the barrier, practically sprinting for the door.

“Where on Altea are you going?” Allura calls after him, but he doesn’t stop, barely offering a shout over his shoulder in response before disappearing down the hall.

“I’m going to talk to Blue!”

 

.x.X.x.

 

When Lance attempts sleep that night, it’s with a lingering sense of unbalance. A growing deck of existentialisms that he can’t seem to stack in any proper order. When he wakes up, will he be in space or still in his bed? Which does he want to be in? If this is real and Voltron was a dream, then what will that say about what he dreams tonight? If he wakes up back on Voltron, will that just be another dream? A dream within a dream? And that’s not to say he’s fully accepted that this isn’t a dream, so if he’s already dreaming, then would that make tonight’s dream a dream within a dream within another dream?

Lance groans, pulling off his headphone and flipping over onto his stomach. Not even his favorite guitar instrumentals seem able to settle his mind tonight. Everything is spinning so out of control in his head, he almost decides to forgo unconsciousness altogether. It seems safer somehow, like whatever illusions he’s created might shatter in his sleep and he’ll wake up to nothingness. Just empty blackness with no one and nothing around. Like waking up in space, floating in star dotted darkness for all eternity.

His chest tightens at the thought, the beginnings of panic settling beneath his skin. But no. He just needs to calm down, stop over thinking everything. He’s here, the world around him as real as the sheets scratching against his bare chest, or the music still playing softly from the speakers of his headphones. It doesn’t matter if he dreams within a dream tonight. He’ll wake up and everything will still be real. He just has to believe in that.

So, after a few deep breaths, Lance returns his headphones to his ears and closes his eyes.

Sleep doesn’t come easily, but it does come, and whatever he dreams about is vague and fragmented, the sort of dreams that leave you the second you wake.

And when Lance wakes, it’s with instant recognition. Feather pillow, cotton sheets, lavender. He pulls his headphones from his ears. His family’s voices, the distant sounds of the ocean, the soft lull of music from the living room. When he finally opens his eyes, he knows what he’ll see. Still, his heart leaps and his eyes water.

Home. 

He’s still home.

Everything suddenly feels lighter.

 

.x.X.x.

 

Keith’s never been to Blue’s hangar before. It looks similar to Red’s, maybe set up at different angles, but otherwise he feels comfortable in its familiarity. Surprisingly, considering the consistency with which she’s been constructing the barrier around Lance, there’s no force field currently around her; perhaps she can’t maintain more than one at a time. If so, there’s something admirable about her priorities there.

As much as the idea has struck him as right and inspiring and _go do this right now_ , Keith doesn’t quite know what to do once he gets there. Especially once he’s standing at the metal feet of Blue’s towering form.

“Um,” he starts, eloquently, wincing when the sound echoes much too loudly in the silence of the hangar. He clears his throat and tries again. “Blue, um… Wait. Lance calls you Blue, right?” He already feels stupid, already feels like this isn’t working, but he presses on anyway. It may not be as strong, but he can feel that same familiar energy again, the one that led him to the shack, helped him lead the first Paladin to his lion. With a breath, Keith carefully places his hand on the cool metal of Blue’s paw.

“Look,” he says, frowning. “I know I’m not your Paladin. And I know you’re just trying to protect him. But we are too, and we can’t do that if you don’t let us in.” He must have said something right, the sensation of magnetic energy increasing, making him feel a bit like she’s vibrating beneath his skin. He looks up, and it seems as though her eyes are trained on him.

At least he knows she’s listening.

“We think he’s in some kind of simulation. But in his mind?” Keith goes on, running a hand over his face in frustration. “We might have a way to get inside his head, but we can’t do that if-”

That rush of energy strengthens again, a shiver running down Keith’s spine. She might not be able to talk to him, not like Red can, but he can still feel something almost tangible in the sensation, like she’s trying to explain something. Like she needs him to listen too.

“We can save him, Blue,” Keith tries, suddenly hopeful. “We just need you to-”

This time, the rush of energy is biting, pushing the air from Keith’s lungs. He takes a step back out of reflex, removing his hand from her paw. There’s no denying the sensation this time, clinging to the back of his throat like something bitter and cold.

Fear.

“What are you afraid of?” He asks, voice softer. “Of losing him?” The accompanying vibrations rumble through every inch of him. The same fear, but more adamant. Again, it feels like she’s trying to tell him something, trying to get him to understand. 

Well, he’s scared too. They all are. 

“I get it,” he says, returning his hand to her paw. “He’s your Paladin, he’s important to you. Well he’s important to us too.” _Important to_ me _too_ , he doesn’t say. But he thinks it loud and clear, and the responding vibration beneath his palm tells him she heard. “We’re going to do everything, _anything_ we can to get him back,” Keith goes on before he can think too much about what he’s saying, what he’s promising. “You just have to trust us. Please, Blue. Can you trust us? Can you trust _me_?”

The onslaught of images nearly knocks him off his feet, each linked so fiercely with Blue’s psyche, Keith swears for a moment that they’ve become one being. He sees them as she does, overlapped and rushed and desperate.

Lance in a darkened cockpit, the Blue Lion sitting unused in the castle’s hangar, a darkened specter sitting at the helm of her controls. Two carbon copies of Lance standing at a crossroads, both walking down different paths, only one of them looking back before disappearing. Lance on a beach in the moonlit night, Lance standing in the rain, clothes soaked through, his face opened up to the sky. Lance with what must be his family. Lance with the rest of the Paladins.

Lance alone, in complete darkness, his back to everything and everyone. Keith reaches out without thinking and his hand falls from Blue’s side, the images shattered. He takes a breath, his head spinning, aching in a way that feels too psychological to be a real headache. More like overload. 

But even as the visions continue to flash in afterimages behind his eyes, it’s Blue’s emotions that paint a picture far more vibrant. Not just fear, not just desperation, but love. A plea. _Hurry, hurry, please bring him back. Please bring my Paladin back before it’s too late. Please save him for me. Please save Lance for me. Please. Hurry. Save him._

“I will,” Keith says, his own determination laced with Blue’s lighting a fire beneath his skin. “I promise you I will. Thank you, Blue.” He doesn’t need to be touching her to know that she believes him. He can feel it like a comforting weight around his heart. The trust he’d asked for, given.

He takes off running.

He barely gives notice to whatever conversation the others are having as he bursts back into the room, everyone turning towards him with a start. Without a word, Keith walks back up to the barrier around Lance, still growing strong, still shining a soft, familiar blue. He puts his hand on it and closes his eyes.

 _I won’t let you down, Blue_ , he thinks, willing the words all the way back to the hangar. _I’ll bring him back to us. I promise you that._

The barrier glitches, sparks, and shatters.

“How did you-?” Allura asks, tone stunned, possibly even awed, but Keith pays her no mind, running up to Lance before the barrier has even fully dissipated. Carefully, he kneels at Lance’s side, touching his fingers to the pulse point at Lance’s neck. Steady, but not exactly what he’d call strong. Like he’s there, but… distant.

“Lance isn’t just in a simulation,” he explains as he inches Lance’s head into his lap, cradling him in a way that feels very much like deja-vu. “I mean, he is, but it’s more than that. If he makes the wrong decision, if he gets too far gone inside his own head, he won’t come back.”

“How do we know he’s not already…” Pidge starts, but not even they’re willing to put an end to that sentence.

“Blue knows,” Keith answers anyway. “They’re still linked, but she can feel him fading. She put up the barrier because she was scared. She knew it wouldn’t be enough just to wake him, he needed to _want_ to wake up. But she can’t reach him anymore.” He looks up then, catches the eyes of everyone in the room. “Not like we can.” 

Pidge jumps to attention, rushing to Keith’s side with two of the headsets they’d used during their first training together as a team. “I tweaked the neural connectivity a bit,” they say, handing one over. Keith takes it, adjusting it diligently over his own head. It fits snugly, pressing up against his forehead, both temples. “Yours will act as the transmitter.” They hold up the other, and Keith takes that one too. “This one will act solely as a receiver.”

“So,” Hunk chimes in, motioning with both hands from Keith to Lance in turn. “Theoretically that means you should be able to walk directly into his head hole with little to no resistance. In fact, he shouldn’t even be able to feel you do it.”

“Unfortunately, this technology was never meant to be utilized in this fashion,” Allura adds. “So there is always the possibility that it won’t-”

“It’ll work,” Keith interrupts. Nobody argues. His eyes lock on Lance’s face, unmoving and almost peaceful, like he’s dreaming. Keith takes a breath. “So how do I start this thing?”

“Same way you used it in training,” Coran offers, gesturing along with each word. “Imagine your objective, focus on obtaining said objective, and allow your mind to create the bridge between the two.”

It sounds too easy, or maybe too vague. Keith frowns. “So I just… Imagine myself literally walking into Lance’s mind.”

“If that’s what obtaining your objective looks like, then yes!” Coran nods, offering what may have been an enthusiastic smile if it wasn’t tinged so obviously with worry.

“Okay,” Keith sighs, looking once more around the room, steeling himself. Shiro is the last to catch his gaze, his mentor taking a step closer, close enough to lay a hand on Keith’s shoulder once more. His smile is genuine, maybe even hopeful.

“You can do this,” he says, and Keith believes him. He has to. So he nods, letting the weight of Shiro’s grasp keep him grounded and determined even after Shiro has stepped away.

“Alright,” Keith nods again, taking in a breath, letting it out, taking in another. On the next exhale, he closes his eyes.

He imagines himself in darkness, imagines Lance facing away a couple of steps out of reach. If it looks too much like Blue’s final vision, he tries not to dwell on it. Instead, Keith starts moving, imagines himself walking up to Lance, wrapping his arms around him, falling into him.

Much like with Blue, there’s a sudden onslaught of images and sounds, phrases spoken on top of each other, pictures overlapping, colors blending together into a mess of sensation. It’s too much to handle for a moment, overwhelming enough that Keith would cover his eyes, his ears, if only he had control of his hands.

He smells lavender and sea salt, tastes plantains and garlic knots, hears children playing and unfamiliar words in Spanish, feels tight hugs and a pat on his head and sand beneath his feet and cotton sheets and soft guitar and homemade dinners and laughter and-

And rain.

 

.x.X.x.

 

“ _Buenos dias, familia~!_ ” Lance speak-sings as he takes the stairs two at a time down into the living room. His mother peeks at him from around the corner, hands still working over the stove.

“Ah. _Claro que si_. My food is the only thing that can wake you up at a reasonable hour then, hm?” She jokes, disappearing back into the kitchen. Lance smiles, a big, giddy thing that stretches across his whole face. He practically skips into the kitchen, his sister seated at the table with a cup of espresso, an eyebrow raised and a smirk pointed in his direction.

“Good food is the world’s strongest motivator, _mama_ ,” Lance channels Hunk and crosses his arms over his chest, feigning a serious expression. “But you know,” he adds after a moment, leaning in to give his mother a quick kiss on the cheek. “So is being home.”

His mother tutts, waving her hand at him to shoo him away, but she’s smiling, eyes fond as they continue to look over the last details of breakfast.

“So where’d the dynamic duo run off to?” Lance sits down across from his sister, reaching for her espresso. She pulls it away with the timing and ease of years of practice. Lance sighs, getting back up to grab his own mug.

“Probably out by the beach again,” his sister smirks, taking a sip. “They wanted to get the most of the weather before the storm rolls in.”

“Storm?” Lance asks, hand pausing on the handle of the kitchen cabinet, his heart stuttering for a beat.

Before she can explain further, however, his mother curses softly under her breath in Spanish, grabbing both their attentions. When they glance her way, she sighs, leaning against the counter. “I forgot to pick up the pasteles from the bakery.”

“I’ll go!” Lance offers without hesitation, surprising both family members.

“Normally I’d have to kick your ass at rock paper scissors to get you to go,” his sister laughs. “What gives?” Lance can’t help the blush that spreads across his cheeks, so he shrugs, smirking through it.

“I just feel like being helpful, that’s all. Is it so condemning that I might wanna be a good son? Sheesh.”

“ _Gracias, mijo_ ,” his mother grabs his hand, placing some cash into his palm. “You’ll have to hurry if you want to beat the rain.”

Excitement is already bubbling beneath his skin. “I’ll be fine, don’t worry. Be back soon, alright?”

His mother nods, patting him on the head once before returning to the stove. His sister, however, grabs at his wrist before he can get away, pulling him close. “I take it you made a decision then?”

Their conversation the night before drifts across his mind like waves on high tide, still dangerous and confusing, but a lot less terrifying now. He smiles, the words, _Sometimes you’ve got to know when to stay on Earth_ , settling in warm and comforting around his heart.

“Maybe,” he shrugs again, but his sister only smiles back. Maybe she can see it in his eyes.

“Glad to hear it, kid,” she chuckles softly, raising her espresso to her lips again. “Try not to get caught in the rain.”

He does.

Not that he was trying too hard to avoid it. The thought of seeing rain again, in person, feeling it against his skin, made his trek slower, his meandering at the bakery longer. By the time they’ve wrapped up the pastries and tucked them away in the bag, a light drizzle has already set in. So when he gets about halfway down the pier, still a good couple of blocks from home, he’s not surprised when he’s hit with a torrential downpour.

Everyone around him scatters, taking shelter anywhere they can. Lance glances down at the bag of pastries, sealed up tight, safe from the rain, and continues on his way. 

The rain soaks him through in minutes, his hair plastered to his face, his jacket heavy and saturated, his jeans sticking to his skin, chaffing against his thighs, but he can’t stop smiling. After another block, he even stops, placing the pasteles down beneath an overhang and tilting his head up to the sky, eyes closed, arms outstretched, just feeling the clod, wet droplets pour down against his face, his neck, his hands.

It’s hard to properly measure the depth with which one can truly, undeniably miss something. You can feel it in waves of sadness or anger or passing memories that clench painfully at your chest. You can imagine what it was like, or pretend that you don’t miss it at all, but it passes through all the same, that irrefutable sensation of _that, I miss that, I want that again_. Impossible to measure, yet so very, very present all the same.

But Lance decides, right then, that the closest he’ll ever come to understanding a measurement of his own, is in those first few moments of getting it back.

His heart swells at the sensation, his lips tugged into a broad, ecstatic grin that he only notices when he runs wet hands over an equally wet face.

 _This_ , he thinks. _I missed this. I want this again_.

The fork in the road stands before him again, a distant but present thought in his mind beneath the pounding of the rain in his ears, and he thinks for a brief moment that his path might be getting clearer. If only he could just starting walking towards-

“Lance!” A voice calls out for him through the noise of the storm. A familiar voice, one that makes his heart stutter just as much as it makes his shoulders tense. Slowly, Lance turns around. As expected, no more than a few feet away, there he is, equally as drenched and staring Lance down with a fierce expression on his face.

“K-Keith?” Lance stutters, clearing his throat before going on, willing his voice to be steady and strong. “What are you doing here?”

Keith covers the distance between them so he can be heard, all the while holding fast to Lance’s gaze. “Lance,” he says again, and something in his voice makes Lance nervous. When he reaches out to grab one of Lance’s hands, he’s too stunned to do more than let him. “Lance, you have to wake up.”

A cold chill runs down Lance’s spine that has noting to do with the rain.

He wrenches his hand out of Keith’s grasp and takes a step back. “What the hell are you talking about, dude?” He sputters, defensive. “I _am_ awake.”

“No,” Keith shakes his head, and this time his eyes soften into something like pity, something like worry, something that makes Lance’s stomach drop. He steps back into Lance’s personal space. “You’re not.”

“What… What are you talking about?” Lance tries to repeat stronger this time, but his heart is pounding loud enough to drown out the rain and his heart is racing and Keith is standing there staring at him, just as drenched and just as detailed and just as _missed_ but in a different way and- “How are you here? What’s going on?”

“You have to listen to me,” Keith continues on as if immune to the sudden panic gripping Lance’s chest. “None of this is real. You’re in a simulation back in the castle. You-”

“No,” Lance shakes his head, a desperate need for Keith to be wrong filling up his every focus. “No. You’re lying. This isn’t… You’re lying! You’re not real!”

“No, _this_ ,” Keith shouts right back, gesturing to the pier, the rain, the beach with its grey and choppy waters. “ _This_ isn’t real! You’re stuck inside your own mind, and if you don’t find a way out soon-”

“Stop it,” Lance shakes his head more firmly this time, clenching his eyes shut, his hands covering his ears as if it’ll stop Keith’s words from getting any closer, any further into his head. “You’re wrong. You’re wrong!”

Perhaps his legs give out, because when he opens his eyes again, he’s kneeling into a puddle on the pier, the water soaking through his already wet jeans. His fingers scratch at his scalp, buried in the strands of his hair. All he can see of Keith are his shoes, so he’s painfully aware of the moment Keith takes another step towards him.

“Lance, please,” he tries to say, but Lance just shakes his head again, again.

“You’re wrong,” he repeats one more time, his throat tight. “This has to be real. I want this to be real!” When he looks up at Keith then, a distant part of him is thankful for the rain; at least Keith might not realize he’s crying. “I w-want this to be real,” he says softer this time, and even if the rain weren’t masking the tears currently running down his cheeks, the hitch in his voice would probably be a substantial clue.

Suddenly, Keith is at eye level again, kneeling close enough that their knees are touching. Keith reaches out once more, grabbing Lance’s hands and pulling them away from his head. “I know,” he whispers, holding them in his lap. “I know you do. But it’s not.”

“Why?” Lance bites his lip, spits the words out through clenched teeth. “Why can’t I have this?”

“Because we need you,” Keith says without hesitation, and the tone of his voice has Lance blinking up at him in surprise. The look on Keith’s face is complicated, but the words he says next are certain. “Because _I_ need you, Lance.”

“You…” Lance starts, but he’s not quite sure how to finish that thought. Something sits beneath Keith’s confession that he can’t quite wrap his head around, not on top of everything else.

“Maybe one day, if we defeat Zarkon,” Keith continues, as if willing the last moment away by force. “You can come back and see them again. You can come back when they’re safe and we’ve won and it’ll be real. It won’t just be a simulation or a memory.” Lance watches Keith’s mouth form the words, watches the determination in his eyes, and his heart slows, if only just bit by bit. “But you can’t keep them safe if you stay here. We can’t defeat anyone if you don’t wake up, do you understand?” Keith’s grip on his hands tightens. “We can’t form Voltron without you or… or protect Earth without you. I can’t… Lance, I can’t do any of this without you, so just…”

Lance watches Keith’s resolve crumble at the edges, a desperation tingeing his words, and something in Lance snaps back into place. He’s not really sure why he does it, but he pulls his hands out of Keith’s grasp and wraps his arms around Keith’s shoulders, pulling him in tight against his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he says into Keith’s ear. The rain is no longer falling, the waves no longer crashing against the shore. Everything is silent sans Lance’s voice and Keith’s ragged breaths. “I didn’t mean to leave you hanging like that, buddy.” The hug loosens but he doesn’t let go, even as he pulls away to look at Keith’s face, so close he could kiss him. Which he wants to. When did _that_ happen? “I can’t believe you came all this way just to pick me up,” he says instead, even though he can feel his cheeks burning, hear the waver in his voice.

Keith doesn’t look much better, his lighter skin practically illuminated in a soft, adorable pink. “Sh-Shut up,” he mumbles, lightly smacking Lance in the side, but he still doesn’t pull away from the loose embrace. “Everyone is worried about you. Even Blue was panicking a little, I think.”

“And you?” Lance hums, leaning in a bit. Out of the corner of his eyes, the surrounding has faded, the details all breaking down piece by piece.

“Me?” Keith looks away, probably noticing it too. Their clothes are dry, the pier beneath them no more than the strips of wood they sit on. All around them, where once were shops and the beach and a grey sky pouring rain, there’s now only cosmos. Lance can see the stars reflected in Keith’s eyes like pinpricks of light making a home among the purplish-blue of his irises.

“Yeah, you,” Lance repeats, leaning in a bit further. “Were you worried too?”

“Of course not,” Keith rolls his eyes, but there’s no heat there, the beginnings of a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “I knew I’d get to you in time.” He pauses, chewing on his bottom lip before speaking again, the color in his cheeks darkening. “And I knew you wouldn’t just… leave us like that.”

 _Leave me_ , he doesn’t say, but Lance hears it as if he had.

“We are a good team,” Lance smiles, covering that last inch of distance between them.

Keith’s lips are surprisingly soft, pliant, and even though Keith gasps in momentary surprise against him, it takes barely a second for him to melt into it too. The kiss is deep but not heated, Lance’s embrace tightening as Keith’s hands hold Lance’s jacket in firm grasps of his own. When Lance licks at Keith’s bottom lip, Keith lets him in without hesitation, falling into Lance all over again, getting as close to him as he can.

When Lance pulls away, it’s to the sound of Keith’s whimpered protest, a sound Lance decides he wants to hear again and again. He makes up for it now by kissing up Keith’s jaw, to his temple, to his forehead, then back, placing one last kiss against his lips in a way that feels too intimate to be entirely chaste.

“Thank you,” Lance whispers against Keith’s lips.

“For what?” Keith whispers right back.

“For coming to get me.”

There’s a moment of comfortable silence between them, their foreheads resting against each other, and then Keith says simply, “At least I didn’t have to save your ass from a Zarkon prison ship. Dragging you out of your own head is a piece of cake in comparison.”

Lance pulls away for a second, blinking in surprise at the seriousness on Keith’s face, but then he’s laughing, soft and breathy chuckles that brush against Keith’s face as he returns their foreheads together.

“You would have saved me from a prison ship too though, right?”

Keith huffs out a soft laugh of his own and Lance can practically feel him rolling his eyes. “Right.”

“You’d probably need _me_ to save _you_ anyway,” Lance adds, just to get under his skin, but surprisingly enough, Keith just wraps his arms around Lance’s waist and mumbles a sarcastic, “Mhm.”

Another moment passes, the crossroad at the back of Lance’s head getting more and more distant as the singular path becomes more pronounced.

Lance clears his throat, burying his face in the crook of Keith’s neck. His words are muffled, but clear. “I’m gonna miss them all over again, aren’t I?” 

“Probably,” Keith replies, and somehow the bluntness of it makes Lance feel just a tad better.

“Promise me we’ll come back to Earth when it’s all over,” Lance holds Keith a little tighter. “Or even just for a quick vacation or something. Have Allura set up a wormhole right over Veradero Beach and we could just… take a day off. Think she’d let us do that?”

For a long moment, Keith doesn’t respond, but when he does, it’s just to mumble the word, “Us?” into Lance’s hair. Lance pulls away, embarrassed.

“Um, well yeah,” Lance nkrowns. “I mean, you’d want to come too, right?”

Keith looks stunned for second, before his expression settles into something Lance has never seen before. Something bordering on fond. “Yeah,” he says at last. “I’d like that a lot.”

“Good,” Lance huffs, instantly burying his face back in Keith’s neck. “I know that’s probably a long way out, but…” He sighs, clinging to the back of Keith’s suit. “I want you to see it one day. The real one.”

“We will,” Keith replies, a vibration of sound next to Lance’s ear, and the confidence in it makes Lance think he might actually believe him.

 

.x.X.x.

 

The both of them come to with a start, Lance’s head rising a bit quicker than Keith’s, resulting in a rather loud, rather painful collision. Lance rolls onto his side, cradling his nose, as Keith removes the headset and rubs rather agitatedly at his forehead.

“You have a really hard head, you know that?” Lance croaks, dragging himself into a seated position at Keith’s side.

“Yeah, well your nose is like a sharpened rock,” Keith throws right back. Neither of them move from where their arms are touching, however, content to continue sitting next to each other for a moment.

“Lance!” Hunk shouts, flinging himself across the room and at his friend, nearly smothering him in an embrace.

“Good to see you too, buddy,” Lance chuckles, voice strained from lack of air.

Everyone else is at their side in a moment, Shiro kneeling down next to Keith, a hand on his shoulder and a look of pride on his face. “I knew you could do it.”

“He was pretty easy to convince,” Keith shrugs, rubbing nervously at the back of his neck. “He just needed somebody to remind him what he was fighting for.”

“I’ll bet,” Pidge snickers, and when Keith and Lance look over, Pidge is smirking in a way that could only be described as Impish. “It was straight out of Sleeping Beauty. One kiss and the princess awakened right as rain.”

“What?” Keith and Lance say in unison, both going a bit pale. An awkward glance passes between the other Paladins, even Allura looking away with a small grin on her face.

Reality sinks in like a brick into the ocean. “That wasn’t… I thought that was all just in my head.” Lance blurts, and Keith’s head falls into his hands, something tight and warm clenching at the pit of his stomach. Lance clears his throat. “Not that… I mean, not that it wasn’t…”

“Lance,” Keith groans into the palms of his hands.

“I’m just saying,” Lance keeps going, the words falling out of his mouth like vomit. “It’s not like I didn’t _mean_ it when I-”

“Oh my god _please_ stop talking,” Keith hisses, reaching out to cover Lance’s mouth with one of his hands. Lance bats him away, suddenly feeling the beginnings of a grin pulling at his lips. It’s probably just hysteria, but he can’t stop. 

“You seemed to like it well enough before,” Lance is smiling full on now, his chest vibrating with restrained laughter, even as Keith tries to tackle him into silence. “Unless I imagined your tongue in my mo-mfp!” Keith manages to get two hands over his mouth, effectively silencing him to little more than muffled noises.

Keith looks over at the rest of the group, everyone in different stages of amusement. Pidge seems to be the only one openly cackling, but everyone else seems close to it. “I’m sending him back. Can I send him back?” Keith pleas, wrenching his hands away when Lance licks a stripe clean across his palm. “Ugh! What are you, five?”

“Watch it, Keith,” Lance continues to grin up at him, smug as ever, especially when he rests his hands behind his head in the perfect display of confidence. “That’s pedophilia.”

“Seriously,” Keith growls, straddling Lance’s hips and grabbing a fist full of his shirt. “Don’t make me regret-”

“Well!” Allura cuts him off with a clap of her hands. “We’ll leave you boys to it then.”

“What?” Keith blanches, suddenly realizing the position he’s in. Before he can collect himself enough to scramble off of Lance’s lap, however, everyone has shouted out words of amused farewell and vanished from the room.

“Hey,” Lance’s voice brings him back to the matter at hand. Keith looks down, and the expression on Lance’s face is playful but soft, somehow managing to instantly shatter the rising fury that had been boiling to life in Keith’s chest. Lance reaches a hand up towards Keith’s face, letting his fingers trail from jaw to throat before settling them on the back of his neck. “It feels good to be back,” Lance smiles, tugging once at Keith’s nape, a question and a request all in one. Keith’s heart jumps a bit, and he feels himself being pulled in, lured in, like falling but slower. When his lips graze Lance’s in a soft kiss, Lance hums a low vibration of approval against him. “Feels real,” he says.

“It is real, you idiot,” Keith replies, a breath of sound between their mouths before he kisses him again. “Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
